Programmable Interactive Visualization of a Core-Collapse Supernova Simulation

Authors: Roland Haas (University of Illinois, National Center for Supercomputing Applications), Philipp Mösta (University of California, Berkeley), Mahendra Roopa (Nvidia Corporation), Alexander Kuhn (Nvidia Corporation), Marc Nienhaus (Nvidia Corporation)

Abstract: Core-collapse supernovae (CCSN) are the birth places of neutron stars and black holes. They liberate the ashes of stellar evolution, seeding the interstellar gas with the elements from which planets form and life is made. Despite their importance for much of astrophysics, our understanding of the supernova explosion mechanism and its dependence on progenitor star properties, is still incomplete. In addition, CCSN simulations generate terabytes of output posing additional challenges regarding the effective analysis of the simulated physical processes. To address those challenges, we present Nvidia IndeX as a scalable framework to visualize the simulation output. The framework features a streaming-based architecture to interactively explore simulation results in distributed multi-GPU environments. We demonstrate how to customize specialized sampling programs for volume and surface rendering to cover specific analysis questions of CCSN simulations. This provides an extensive level of control over the visualization while efficiently using available resources to achieve high-levels of performance and visual accuracy.

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